y grandma was way too nice. I’d pal around with her to the grocery store, then beg for some sugary box of cereal.

She’d give in, buy the Fruity Pebbles, but that wouldn’t be the end of it. When we get back to her house, she’d help me pour the entire contents into her largest bowl. Then, together we’d fish out whatever junky toy was advertised.

The best of these freebies required more planning. I’d need to collect multiple proofs of purchase, then send them in an envelope to a special address. An interminable six to eight weeks later, the object would arrive, usually around the time I’d finally forgotten about it.

These physical giveaways have basically disappeared in the modern times. A popular movie burned them into my memory, though it takes place WAY before my time.

Ralphie is a kid growing up in the 1940s, obsessed with his favorite radio show. Little Orphan Annie has been teasing something special: a secret decoder ring, available in exchange for the gold-colored seals from chocolate Ovaltine.

Every day he checks the mailbox. Nothing. Then finally, the package. He tears it open, listens to the show with the intensity of someone defusing a bomb, scribbles down the numbers, and locks himself in the bathroom (which, for a kid in that house, is basically a secure facility).

Listening to the secret code on the radio program, he prepares to decode the message. You can follow along with Ralphie if you buy your own on eBay (for quite a bit more than those proofs of purchase):

In the movie, he works through every number. Translates each to a letter. And reads what he’s got:

BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE

Both Ralphie and the audience feel it. All that anticipation, all that excitement. For a sales message.

“A crummy commercial.”

Developers have decoded a lot of messages like that. They’ve been Ralphie. They know the feeling.

So by the time they land on your product page, they’re not reading with open arms. They’re watching for the moment the message turns. And when they see “Book a Demo” before they even know if you solve their problem—before they know what the product actually does—they’ve already decoded it.

Crummy commercial.

The hard part is that many dev tools start from their specific solution. Their product.

If you’ve read one of my books, this isn’t news. But it’s actually more true now than when they were published.

The fix isn’t to hide the product. It’s to earn the moment. Start from what a developer is actually trying to accomplish. Help them get there.

That’s the currency that buys trust with developers.

It also happens to be how they find you now. Developers aren’t typing your product name into Claude. They’re describing a problem they’re trying to solve. The tools that show up are the ones that have spent time speaking developer—not the ones that spent time optimizing for their own preferred framing.

​LLM Rank shows you how dev tools actually appear in AI, based on the way developers really search. Not how you wish they’d find you.